Giving Up Baby Like Losing an Arm, Surrogate Mother Testifies

A surrogate mother testified Thursday she realized while giving birth that she could not give up her baby and that handing her daughter over to the couple who hired her made her feel like “somebody was cutting my arm off.”

Mary Beth Whitehead said that throughout her pregnancy she understood she would have to give her child to William and Elizabeth Stern. But, she said, her feelings changed in the delivery room.

“It overwhelmed me,” she testified. “It’s just . . . I had no control.”

After the child was born, the 29-year-old housewife said she and her husband, Richard, decided to keep the baby, but did not know the proper way to tell the Sterns.

Under a $10,000 contract, Whitehead had agreed to be artificially inseminated with Stern’s sperm and bear the baby for the childless couple. After deciding not to give the Tenafly couple the child, Whitehead fled to Florida with the infant and was returned to New Jersey by authorities. She had not received any of the money.

Three Different Names

The 9-month-old baby--named Sara by the Whiteheads, Melissa by the Sterns and referred to in court documents as Baby M--has been in the temporary custody of the Sterns while the court battle over her has proceeded.

Three days after the baby’s March 27 birth, Whitehead gave her to the Sterns. But the following day the Sterns returned the child to her natural mother for a visit because they feared Whitehead was suicidal, Elizabeth Stern has testified.

The next time the Sterns and Whitehead met was April 12 when the surrogate told them for the first time they could not have the child.

“Seeing her and holding her, (I knew) she was my child,” Whitehead testified. “I thought that for her I had to keep her.”

The next meeting between the parties came May 5 when the Sterns arrived at the Whiteheads’ Brick Town home with five police officers, demanding that Whitehead give up the baby.

Whitehead said that while she was pleading with the Sterns, her husband took the baby out the back door. It was after that she fled to Florida.